Epithalamium by Adam Zagajewski

Epithalamium

Without silence there would be no music.

Life paired is doubtless more difficult

than solitary existence -

just as a boat on the open sea

with outstretched sails is trickier to steer

than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners

after all are meant for wind and motion,

not idleness and impassive quiet.

A conversation continued through the years includes

hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred,

but also compassion, deep feeling.

Only in marriage do love and time,

eternal enemies, join forces.

Only love and time, when reconciled,

permit us to see other beings

in their enigmatic, complex essence,

unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement

in a valley, or among green hills.

In begins from one day only, from joy

and pledges, from the holy day of meeting,

which is like a moist grain;

then come the years of trial and labor,

sometimes despair, fierce revelation,

happiness and finally a great tree

with rich greenery grows over us,

casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

The Far Field by Theodore Roethke

The Far Field

I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:

Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel

Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,

The road lined with snow-laden second growth,

A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,

Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,

And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,

The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,

Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,

Where the car stalls,

Churning in a snowdrift

Until the headlights darken.

II

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,

Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,

Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,

Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,

Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --

One learned of the eternal;

And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles

(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)

And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,

Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,

Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,

My grief was not excessive.

For to come upon warblers in early May

Was to forget time and death:

How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,

And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, -- 

Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, -- 

Moving, elusive as fish, fearless, 

Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,

Still for a moment,

Then pitching away in half-flight,

Lighter than finches,

While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,

And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

-- Or to lie naked in sand,

In the silted shallows of a slow river,

Fingering a shell,

Thinking:

Once I was something like this, mindless,

Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;

Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;

Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,

Believing:

I'll return again,

As a snake or a raucous bird,

Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,

The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,

The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,

The wheel turning away from itself,

The sprawl of the wave,

The on-coming water.

III

The river turns on itself,

The tree retreats into its own shadow.

I feel a weightless change, a moving forward

As of water quickening before a narrowing channel

When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;

Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent

And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, -- 

At first a swift rippling between rocks,

Then a long running over flat stones

Before descending to the alluvial plane,

To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.

The slightly trembling water

Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;

And the crabs bask near the edge,

The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, -- 

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,

A point outside the glittering current;

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,

At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,

My mind moves in more than one place,

In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,

The dry scent of a dying garden in September,

The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.

What I love is near at hand,

Always, in earth and air.

IV

The lost self changes,

Turning toward the sea,

A sea-shape turning around, -- 

An old man with his feet before the fire,

In robes of green, in garments of adieu.

A man faced with his own immensity

Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.

The murmur of the absolute, the why

Of being born falls on his naked ears.

His spirit moves like monumental wind

That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.

He is the end of things, the final man.

All finite things reveal infinitude: 

The mountain with its singular bright shade

Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, 

The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;

Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,

A scent beloved of bees;

Silence of water above a sunken tree : 

The pure serene of memory in one man, --

A ripple widening from a single stone

Winding around the waters of the world.

My God, It's Full of Stars by Tracy K. Smith

My God, It's Full of Stars

          1. 

We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,

Only bigger. One man against the authorities.

Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand

The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants

Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,

This message going out to all of space. . . . Though

Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,

Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics

Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine

A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,

Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing

To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

While the father storms through adjacent rooms

Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,

Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.

All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils

In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

The books have lived here all along, belonging

For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence

Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.

          2.

Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.

A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,

He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.

Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,

Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,

Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires

Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t.

I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.

That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.

Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank

Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.

He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,

Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:

May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.

Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.

A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air

Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.

We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone

One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.

Our eyes adjust to the dark.

          3.

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.

Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

So that I might be sitting now beside my father

As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

For the first time in the winter of 1959.




          4.
 

In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001

When Dave is whisked into the center of space,

Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light

Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid

For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,

Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,

Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent

And vague, swirls in, and on and on. . . . 

In those last scenes, as he floats

Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,

Over the lava strewn plains and mountains

Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink.

In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked

Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,

Who knows what blazes through his mind?

Is it still his life he moves through, or does

That end at the end of what he can name?

On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,

Then the costumes go back on their racks

And the great gleaming set goes black.

          5.

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said

They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed

In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,

His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,

When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons

Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.

His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending

Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons

For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed

For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,

The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

I started Early – Took my Dog – (656) by Emily Dickinson

I started Early – Took my Dog – (656)

I started Early – Took my Dog – 

And visited the Sea – 

The Mermaids in the Basement

Came out to look at me – 

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor 

Extended Hempen Hands – 

Presuming Me to be a Mouse – 

Aground – opon the Sands – 

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide 

Went past my simple Shoe – 

And past my Apron – and my Belt 

And past my Boddice – too – 

And made as He would eat me up – 

As wholly as a Dew 

Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve – 

And then – I started – too – 

And He – He followed – close behind – 

I felt His Silver Heel 

Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes 

Would overflow with Pearl – 

Until We met the Solid Town – 

No One He seemed to know – 

And bowing – with a Mighty look – 

At me – The Sea withdrew – 

Potions by Yusef Komunyakaa

Potions

The old woman made mint

Candy for the children

Who'd bolt through her front door,

Silhouettes of the great blue

Heron. She sold ten-dollar potions

From a half-lit kitchen. Chinese boxes

Furnished with fliers & sinkers. Sassafras

& lizard tongues. They'd walk out

Of the woods or drive in from cities,

Clutching lovesick dollar bills

At a side door that opened beside

A chinaberry tree. Did their eyes

Doubt under Orion as voices

Of the dead spoke? They carried

Photos, locks of hair, nail clippings,

& the first three words of a wish. 

 

Chekhov by Austin Smith

Chekhov

They say you may have caught

tuberculosis from the peasants

who came to Melikhovo

to be seen by you. Hearing them

coughing in the hall you put down

your pen and rose from your desk.

Short of breath, they had travelled

all night to arrive by dawn, drawn

by rumors of your kindness.

While you warmed the stethoscope

in your hands and the old farmer

bared his chest, your character

stood patiently on the doorstep,

holding a letter of introduction

you had yet to write. The longer

you spent away from the story

the harder it would be to finish it,

but the hall was long, the line

out the door, and you would turn

none away, knowing how far

they had come for the comfort

of having someone

listen to their lungs and say it

sounded better than it sounded

while you stood breathing

in their sighs of relief,

saying, softly, “Next.”

 

Apologia by Saeed Jones

Apologia

If I started with the words He made me—

not like He created me,

not like With my clothes off, you can still see his thumbprints

in the clay that became my skin.

No. If I started with He made me

lick the taste of bullet

from the barrel of his revolver

would you use your body to guard my body tonight?

The roof has been ripped off and the stars refuse

to peel their stares from my bruises.

I didn’t mean He

as in God; I meant the man I traded you for.